CONCEPT
The Space of Reasons
Wilfrid Sellars’s name for the normative order in which claims are correct or incorrect, justified or unjustified, and speakers owe each other answers—the domain that distinguishes genuine knowing from mere reliable production of outputs.
The logical space of reasons is
Wilfrid Sellars’s name for the dimension of human life organized by justification rather than causation. In the space of causes, events happen because prior events made them happen—physical regularity, mechanism, the lawful unfolding of nature. In the space of reasons, claims are correct or incorrect, commitments can be made and honored or violated, one assertion entitles you to another and commits you to a third, and you can be asked “why do you believe that?” and owe a genuine answer. Sellars’s most consequential sentence asserts that knowing is always a placement in this second space: “to characterize an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.” A
large language model is, in its physical reality, a system in the space of causes: an elaborate regularity in which a pattern of input reliably produces